Just as Brutus betrays Julius Caesar by literally spilling Caesar’s guts, metafiction betrays the fragility of the text by exposing fiction’s metaphorical entrails. Yet, unlike Caesar, who dies after this betrayal, fiction does not die after metafiction’s betrayal. On the contrary, through the machinations of metafiction, fiction’s tenacity is demonstrated. What metafiction really betrays, then, is not fiction’s fragility, but that the way in which we apprehend reality, whether textual or objective, is ontologically tenuous and malleable. It seems that we are not that different from the inhabitants of Tlön in Borges’s short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, who are “congenitally idealists” (8). In other words, we, like the inhabitants of Tlön, understand reality only as it is mediated by our minds. Thus, metafiction’s betrayal of the artifice and construction inherent in fiction is one that exposes the close relationship between fiction and reality, which paradoxically reaffirms and reinvigorates the ontology of fiction and fictional realities.
In this essay, I examine three metafictional texts: Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in order to explicate on my argument of fiction’s tenacity as illuminated by metafiction. To clarify, I understand the term “metafiction” as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact” by “providing a critique of [its] own methods of construction” (Waugh 2). Patricia Waugh provides a succinct encapsulation of her own definition when she says that metafiction “explore[s] a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction” (2). Modifying Waugh’s definition, a “text” is understood in this paper as “fictional writing which … [does not] draw attention to its status as an artefact”. In other words, “text” is understood as realist fiction that mimes an objective reality; that is, any fictional work that purports to reflect and represent accurately a reality that exists and endures independently of our perceptions (Mulder). Furthermore, this form of fiction has to remain unaware of its status as a linguistic construct. Or, if not entirely unaware, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in which the reader is addressed directly, then the realist text should not focus on its ontological status in its narrative, or it will highlight the seeming incompatibility of representing objective reality through subjective and unstable words, with the result that it self-contradictorily thwarts its project of mimesis.
In light of the above definitions of “metafiction” and “text”, it is immediately apparent that there are contradictory impulses that cleave “metafiction” and “text” apart. Essentially, the realist fictional text desires to function as an invisible frame through which we, as readers, experience a fictional reality that is mimetic of objective reality. But even as the realist text desires, and purports, to represent reality through its fiction, it is a desire that cannot be fulfilled without complicity on our part, through what Coleridge terms the “willing suspension of disbelief” (314). I suggest that a realist text typically identifies itself and signals its requirement of our “suspension of disbelief” through its use of literary conventions, such as a third-person omniscient narrator, a linear chronology, eschewing direct address of the reader, and so on. These are conventions that we react to so spontaneously that “it has become a second nature: as ‘native readers of fiction’ we take it for granted that worlds should emerge from texts” (Ryan 125). To modify Coleridge’s idiom, when we read, and recognise, a realist text, we willingly – and instinctively – suspend our disbelief that printed words on a page can constitute a form of reality. This suspension of disbelief allows us to experience the world in the text, and seems to be the foundation of all realist fiction.
On the other hand, the metafictional text wants to highlight and comment self-reflexively on its own linguistic construction of reality, a reality that is semiotically erected, and hence “false” and not objective. Unlike the realist text that wants to function as an invisible frame, the metafictional text draws attention to its status as a frame that is made of language, such as when the narrator of Traveller cautions us to “[m]ake sure the page isn’t in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background” (Calvino 4). The fact that the textual reality contained within the novel is simply a collection of “black letters” is raised right at the metafictional text’s inception. The metafictional text, then, seems to force us to suspend our suspension of disbelief, whether willingly or unwillingly, by foregrounding our act of reading as a cognitive process that translates printed words on a page, which are written by an author, into an imaginative, and imagined, construct of reality.
Aside from foregrounding its status as a textual artefact, the metafictional text achieves this self-awareness most commonly by subverting the aforementioned literary conventions of the realist text. For instance, in TFLW, Fowles employs a self-aware narrator who interjects in the narrative. This disrupts and subverts our conception of the omniscient narrator who is immersed, while simultaneously uninvolved, in the narrative of realist fiction. One of the first occurrences of this narratorial intrusion in TFLW is when Fowles makes a footnote in the text to comment on “mid-Victorian (unlike modern) agnosticism and atheism” by quoting “George Eliot” (52). The footnote demonstrates the narrator’s, and the text’s, self-referentiality in two ways. One, by using the term “mid-Victorian”, the text emphasises its temporal fictionality, as we are made aware of the chronological disjunction between our twenty-first-century reality and the text’s “Victorian” reality. Furthermore, that the narrator can look at the Victorian era and identify it as such situates him as chronologically contemporaneous with our reality. Two, by quoting George Eliot, a Victorian author, TFLW emphasises its status as the textual product of an author who is counterfeiting, so to speak, the particular chronological signature of George Eliot. We become aware that we are not experiencing Victorian England, but are looking back at Victorian England through a twenty-first-century lens that inevitably refracts and distorts; a lens, furthermore, that is made of language. Moreover, the use of footnotes suggests an editorial or critical presence that is superimposed atop the narrative frame, which accentuates that it is Fowles the author who makes the footnote instead of the narrator who makes an aside that can blend into the narrative quietly. In combination, these metafictional features seem to shatter any pretence of the text functioning as an invisible frame to a textual reality that is mimetic of an objective one. Just as “The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia” in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is “a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannic”, metafiction seems to suggest that fiction is a literal but delinquent representation of objective reality (3).
The metafictional elements in Calvino’s Traveller announce themselves more straightforwardly and dramatically than in TFLW. At the beginning of Traveller, the narrator proclaims:
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. (Calvino 3)
In its very first sentence, the novel incorporates into its narrative us, the readers, whom the novel addresses as “[y]ou”, its author, “Italo Calvino”, and its own title, “If on a winter’s night a traveler”. This self-reflexive move suggests that Traveller is conflating the ontological planes of its fictional reality and our objective reality, or, as Traveller puts it, “the world around you”. Through this, the novel also flags up its recognition that it is a linguistic construction that depends on both an author and a reader for the materialisation of its textual reality. Traveller’s awareness of the two realities, and its immediate conflation of them, effectively dismantles any illusion of an independent textual reality that arises from our suspension of disbelief.
Fig. 1. Drawing Hands, M.C. Escher.
More significantly, through Traveller’s depiction of itself as “Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler”, it seems to be engaging in a linguistic mise en abyme that suggests the fallibility of language’s capacity to represent objective reality. That is to say that the phrase “Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler” does not refer to anything in reality prior to the writing of these very words.
Like Drawing Hands, Escher’s lithograph of two hands that draw each other in an infinitely regressing paradox, the phrase “Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler” as it first occurs in the novel validates its own truth. Traveller creates itself ontologically as it describes itself linguistically. Superimposing this idea onto Escher’s lithograph, we realise that Traveller’s language is drawing Traveller’s being which is drawing Traveller’s language through its being, ad infinitum. This suggests that any attempt to portray objective reality is futile as language in Traveller only refers to itself in a regressive and infinite sequence (Waugh 47). Thus, in TFLW and Traveller, we see how the metafictional text’s project to draw attention to itself cleaves apart from the realist text’s desire to remain an invisible frame, with the result that the realist text’s mechanisms are exposed by any metafictional elements. This cleavage, then, constitutes metafiction’s betrayal of the fragility of the text, where fragility is understood as the self-deceptive illusion (to us and to the text itself) that the realist fictional text reflects objective reality.
However, despite this initial assertion that metafiction betrays the fragility of the text, the notion of “betrayal” must be interrogated further. In the context of this essay, the word “betray” seems to activate definition 5 of the OED, which is “[t]o disclose or reveal with breach of faith (a secret, or that which should be kept secret)”. Two questions, along with their attendant implications, arise from this definition. One, why is a text’s fragility thought of as something “which should be kept secret”? Two, if metafiction does betray fiction’s fragility, to whom does it betray this to?
I contend that, contrary to what may first spring to mind, metafiction does not betray the text’s fragility to us, the readers. At this point, it is useful to reiterate Ryan’s observation that “[w]e are so used to playing the fictional game that it has become a second nature: as ‘native readers of fiction’ we take it for granted that worlds should emerge from texts” (125). I want to emphasise the notions within her observation that we are “so used to playing the fictional game” to that point where reading is “second nature” to us, and that we “take [it] for granted”. Implicit within these notions is the idea that we are so habituated to reading texts that we react instinctively to literary conventions, which, to reiterate, take the form of a chronologically linear narrative, characters who behave as if they are fully actualised human beings and not linguistic constructs, and so on. We are not surprised, and even expect, to encounter these devices when we read a novel. Our underlying expectation thus enables us to slip into the world of the text seamlessly, which, in turn, suggests that these conventions are so naturalised that we cease to identify them consciously. It is our unconscious identification and subsequent blindness to literary conventions that the textual reality seems a fully-realised and immersive reality to us.
The centrality of the reader’s role in generating the textual world is a concept that is echoed by other modern theorists, such as Hutcheon and Iser. Hutcheon argues that “[t]he reader of fiction is always an actively mediating presence; the text’s reality is established by his response and reconstituted by his active participation” (141); Iser posits that “[t]he convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence … [and] it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader” (279). Glossing very broadly, both theories of reading emphasise the role of the “active” reader in bringing to fruition the world within the text. The reader is seen as “active” or engaged as he responds draws upon his own imagination and memories to respond to the text in a personal way. It follows from this that the textual reality is a collaboration between the text and the reader, and is not a monologic or hegemonic discourse presented solely by the text. More significantly, implied within these theories is the notion raised earlier: that for the reader to respond to, and envisage, the textual world imaginatively, the reader has to have a stock of knowledge that allows him to orient himself in a text in an unconscious way that does not continually disrupt the seemingly mimetic quality of the textual world.
Detractors may insist that the reader plays a passive role instead of an active one, that is, the reader is subservient to the text’s discourse and cannot respond to it, and is a witness to, not a participant of, to the textual world. Yet this passive role still necessitates the ability to handle literary conventions such as metaphor. For instance, a reader may not know the exact definition of a metaphor or how a metaphor specifically works in the way a literary theorist might, but a rudimentary understanding that a metaphor is not a literal description has to be present for any sort of coherent reading to function. When the narrator of TFLW uses the mixed metaphors of “a moth infatuated by a candle” which “risked himself in such dangerous waters” to describe Charles, even a passive reader has to, at the very least, negotiate with the text’s use of metaphors to realise that it is the metaphorical, and not literal, register that is being used, in order to get any sense of the sentence in the first place, lest the reader is confused by Charles’s sudden metamorphosis into a moth which is swimming (Fowles 183-4). This is a realisation, then, that is analogous to our implicit knowledge of literary conventions that structures the “unconscious” way we read.
The point that I am making here is that, even though we react unconsciously to the conventions that identify and characterise realist fictional text, it is a process that is acquired only through habituation, whether through explicit learning or subliminal absorption by reading widely. Thus, it cannot be said that we are unaware that all texts are fundamentally linguistic constructs that rely on conventions and mechanisms to evince their reality. After all, we only “suspend” our disbelief, a temporary elevation that has to allow the disbelief to take root again at some point of time – perhaps when we reach the last word of any text. If we are not unaware, but are merely suspending this awareness, or have been conditioned to ignore it, then it is hardly a secret to us.
Metafiction only makes us conscious of these conventions again by identifying them explicitly, such as when the narrator of TFLW self-reflexively comments on his use of metaphors. The narrator realises that his description of Charles as a moth that is drowning in deep waters, as aforementioned above, is an instance of “mixing metaphors – but that was how Charles’s mind worked” (184). By displaying an awareness of the reader and his use of metaphors, the narrator of TFLW defamiliarises us from its textual reality that we were hitherto immersed in, and forces us to recognise that this textual reality is constituted through the interaction of a reader and conventions such as metaphors. Yet, as Waugh points out, metafiction’s form of “defamiliarization proceeds from an extremely familiar base” (13). This suggests that we possess an essential familiarity with how the text works, a familiarity that has to exist prior to the defamiliarisation process.
Likewise, we understand the word “fiction” as “prose novels and stories collectively”. But we also use it to describe the “inventi[on] [of] imaginary incidents, existences, states of things, etc., whether for the purpose of deception or otherwise” (OED). In combination, the tensed intermingling valences of the word suggest that our awareness of the fictional text’s status as an artificial and “imaginary” construct that is based on our suspension of its “deception” is embedded in our everyday discourse. Thus, the text’s fragility is not a secret that metafiction betrays to us – and even if one insists that it is a secret because it is buried within the unconscious, it is, then, only a badly kept, open secret, liable to be spilled in various forms.
Instead, I suggest that metafiction betrays the text’s fragility to itself. By this, I simply mean that metafiction discloses to the text that the reality that it is attempting to portray is a textual one that comprises linguistic signs. The text, then, can no longer continue in good faith to pretend to be a transparent or invisible frame through which it allows us to apprehend objective reality. One of the manifestations of this betrayal is when the characters in TFLW and Traveller betray the dictates of their author or narrator, shifting the register from a realist novel to a metafictional one. Here, I note that when I refer to the characters in the novels, I use the word “betray” in the sense of definition 2a of the OED, “to be disloyal to” as opposed to definition 5 cited earlier, “[t]o disclose or reveal with breach of faith (a secret, or that which should be kept secret)”. But I suggest that it is through the character’s disloyalty, or betrayal (sense 2a), that they reveal or betray (sense 5) the secret fragility of the text’s ontological status.
In TFLW, this betrayal occurs when Fowles writes that he “ordered [Charles] to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy” (98). Pre-empting objections that “the novelist stands next to God” (97), that is, that the author exerts an omnipotent control over all aspects of his novel, Fowles explains that Charles’s decision to go to the Dairy “seemed to [him] to come clearly from Charles, not [him]self” (98). In this, Fowles suggests that his characters have an agency that exceeds his authorial control. Implications of freedom and restraint and how they regulate textual reality’s relationship with objective reality are raised here. But what I want to foreground in this quotation is the act of double betrayal, so to speak, in the text, and how this betrayal structures the rest of the text. Charles first betrays Fowles’s wishes for him, necessitating Fowles’s entrance into the text to provide an explanation for this transgression; Fowles’s entrance, subsequently, betrays to the text that it is not an autonomously existing mirror that reflects reality, but the linguistic construct of an author. In other words, Charles’s betrayal forces Fowles to reveal that the entire novel is really an act of “fixing the fight” while “persuading us that they were not fixed” (390); that is, TFLW as a text is essentially staged and artificial, but pretends to be real and objective.
This revelation to the text modulates the progression of the rest of the narrative in TFLW. After Fowles’s self-conscious appearance in the text, the text seems to fracture irrevocably, and can only articulate and think of itself in the metafictional mode. This indicates that TFLW seems unable to sustain further the fragile illusion that it is miming reality after Fowles wonders if he has “disgracefully broken the illusion” (99). With this illusion of reality broken, TFLW is fully self-conscious that it is “a novel” (97). The culmination of this double betrayal is, then, a transition from realist fiction into metafiction. I suggest further that this transition serves as the impetus to Fowles’s provision of three different endings to TFLW. Fowles, having raised the notion that the typical monolithic closure of a realist text is an act of “fixing the fight”, denies TFLW such a closure due to its implications as an unethical act that trades on pretence and deceit, which also signals a willful ignorance of the text’s ontological status (390). Therefore, the ambiguity and plurality that the three different endings suggest seem to be the metafictional text’s attempt to negotiate a new way of ending its narrative that simultaneously satisfies its desire to provide closure, while remaining ethically aware of, and attempting to absolve, its ontological status as a constructed text that is “fix[ed]”. Admittedly, it can be claimed that providing three endings is just an instance of “fixing the fight” three times, a more grievous injustice than fixing it just once. Yet the emphasis seems to be on the text’s desire to provide an acknowledgement of its fictional qualities, hence the seemingly arbitrary and plural endings that would be inconceivable in objective reality, and not on the text’s desire to portray a realism that is contingent on the imperative of “true” freedom that the three different endings might initially seem to grant.
Similarly, the fictional mechanisms of Traveller are exposed to itself when the “Reader” character in Traveller betrays his author’s intentions. In fact, Traveller subtly alludes to this resistance to authorial authority early in the novel, when the narrator introduces the reader to the novel:
So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognize it at all. (Calvino 9)
The narrator describes the reading process as an “attack”, suggesting that the character of the “Reader” who both reads and lives the text will attempt to dismantle the text. This connotation of interpretive violence is our first indication that there is tension within the text itself. Moreover, the narrator initially expects the reader to “recognize the unmistakable tone of the author”. In this phrase, the “tone of the author” seems to be a synecdoche for the voice of the author which, following Fowles’s statement that “the novelist stands next to God” we intuitively associate with the voice of a figurative God (97). The voice of the author is, then, also the voice of the creator of the textual reality, whose word gives rise to the world. Not “recogniz[ing] it at all”, then, implies a defiance of the author’s word and world (Calvino 9).
Thus, with this foreshadowing, it comes as no surprise when the narrator in Traveller seems to lose control of his character, who engages has “carnal relations” with Alfonsina-Sheila-Alexandra against the narrator’s wishes:
Reader, what are you doing? Aren’t you going to resist? Aren’t you going to escape? Ah, you are participating. Ah, you fling yourself into it, too… You’re the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters? Like this, without any preparation…? (219)
Like Charles in TFLW who “has begun to gain an autonomy” (Fowles 98), the “Reader” in Traveller demonstrates signs of radical independence (Calvino 219). As the figure of the reader is, in Traveller, conflated with the figure of the “protagonist of this book”, it seems that Traveller is in fact inviting the reader to participate in an act of betrayal against itself. This reinforces the idea that metafiction does not betray the fragility of a text to the reader as the reader is in a privileged position of power. The narrator’s expression of surprise, then, seems an indication that it is the realist fictional text that attains a sudden revelation from this act of betrayal, as indicated by the narrator’s numerous questions in the above quotation. Thus, akin to Charles’s disloyalty to Fowles in TFLW, the “Reader’s” amorous acts in Traveller constitutes a betrayal of the author’s word that forces the author to enter the text, which in turn announces the text as a text.
Yet, what “fragility” is being betrayed by these metafictional elements, really? Though we may initially be taken aback by the sudden intrusion of the author due to our assumption that, for example, the narrator in TFLW is a third-person omniscient one mimetic of the Victorian narrators, we quickly recover from our surprise. We are even amused and entertained by the “Reader’s” cheeky disobedience to the author in Traveller. Furthermore, probing the statement “metafiction betrays the fragility of the text” further, it seems that it is a tautological one that already assumes its answer: it is only through this betrayal of the text that metafiction can exist in the first place. In other words, the text has to betray to itself its own fragility in order to be read as metafiction, as suggested also by the definition of the term “metafiction” earlier in the essay. Viewed in this light, the betrayal of the text is one that enables metafiction to exist, and not one that lessens the ontology of the text.
The point that I am driving towards here is that even if metafiction betrays the fragility of the text, the consequences of this betrayal is not an irrevocable shattering, but one that grants the characters and the text greater ontology. By “greater ontology”, I mean that this betrayal paradoxically furthers the realist fictional text’s desire to reflect an objective reality by allowing it to transition into the status of metafiction, which is a form that, I argue, reflects a more authentic reality than the realist fictional text.
Though not discussing metafiction specifically, Iser echoes this point when he views the “trick … whereby the author himself takes part in the narrative” one that “establish[es] perspectives which would not have arisen out of the mere narration of the events described” (294). Furthermore, Iser hypothesises that this “trick” “may be integrated into a consistent pattern, lying, as it were, a level deeper than our original impressions” (294). In this, Iser seems to be gesturing, although very obliquely, to metafiction’s rejuvenation of the writing and reading process through its allowance of new forms of and approaches to mimesis that give rise to new “perspectives”, or consciousness, of reality. I also want to engage with Iser’s use of the word “lying”, which is ostensibly used in its valence of “resting, reclining, remaining in deposit” (OED). But when Iser qualifies his use of the word “lying” by saying “as it were”, he activates the polysemous quality of the word, and seems to make an implicit point: that metafiction, despite revealing how fiction works by “lying”, in the sense of “falsehood”, nevertheless allows, through its betrayal, fiction’s lies to penetrate to “a level deeper than our original impressions”. It is as if metafiction allows the flat mirror of a realist text to gain additional surfaces, returning a reflection that is simultaneously the same, but also more faceted and multi-dimensioned.
Going back to the aforementioned example in TFLW, Charles’s betrayal of Fowles causes Fowles to realise that he “must respect [Charles’s autonomy] and disrespect all [his] quasi-divine plans for him, if [he] wish him to be real” (98). Fowles’s desire for Charles “to be real” is fundamentally the desire of any realist text, and it seems that this awareness is granted only by the author’s metafictional entrance into the text. If it were Charles himself who declares that he is free from Fowles, we would immediately detect the irony within that statement. Hence, it seems as if we require Fowles the author’s declaration that he “must give [Charles], and Tina, and Sarah, and even the abominable Mrs Poultney, their freedoms” before we are convinced that these characters are truly free and real (99). Of course, this still depends on how much we trust the author-narrator and what his intentions behind such a declaration are. In this case, our suspicions are quelled as Fowles’s intrusion into the narrative of the text prompts him to write that he “find[s] this new reality (or unreality)” in which the author acknowledges his presence within the text “more valid” than the “illusion” of reality within the realist text (99). Fowles finds this metafictional reality more valid as he suggests that we construct narratives to apprehend our objective reality, to the extent that we “fictionalise it” and “are all in flight from the real reality” (99). That is, Fowles is suggesting that it is more authentic and ethical to include metafictional elements in a text, such as the text’s awareness of its own fictionalising, as it captures how we live in objective reality.
Metafiction, then, does not betray the text’s fragility, but allows it additional dimensions and ontological planes to represent more accurately and ethically objective reality, which reaffirms and reinvigorates the realist fictional text. For instance, our first encounter with the narrator’s use of a “computer” as a metaphor to describe Sarah’s heart in TFLW strikes us as a deliberate anachronism that alerts us to the chronological disjunction between the narrator and the subject he is narrating (57). More broadly, that we understand the narrator’s description of Sarah’s heart as a “computer” points to the fact that we are reading a novel that depicts the Victorian era with our twenty-first-century minds, a temporal distance and incongruity that problematises the authenticity of the Victorian textual reality that we experience in the text.
Yet, upon second thought, the metaphor of a “computer” portrays to a twenty-first-century audience the reality of Sarah’s heart much more accurately than any Victorian phrase, such as “calculating device”, can (57). Fowles seems to suggest in his use of this metafictional metaphor, then, that metafictional elements can contribute to the reality of a text as much as it can seemingly dismantle it. Furthermore, later on in the novel Charles is re-imagined as “the Charles of today, a computer scientist” (285). This incidental detail attains fuller meaning when we make the connection between it and the description of Sarah’s heart as a “computer” we encounter much earlier in the novel. The re-imagined “Charles of today, a computer scientist”, studies computers; in other words, the Charles of today studies Sarah’s heart, the computer. Through a seemingly anachronistic and metafictional metaphor the novel’s characterisation of Charles’s relationship with Sarah is deepened and clarified: Charles is not merely infatuated with Sarah’s physical attributes, but with her personality as well. By providing the narrator with more levels of discourse that go beyond the diegesis of the plot, metafictional elements allow a narrative to stretch the borders that frame its plot, or even just to enable a more poetic turn of phrase that adds to the pleasures of reading, in a way that realist fiction is unable to. This gives rise to new and surprising resonances that nuance the representation of reality in the narrative.
Similarly, Traveller speaks in the metafictional register while narrating its plot to give its textual reality more gradations than it enabled by the restrictive palette of a realist text. The narrator of the first incipit, “If on a winter’s night a traveler”, describes how “steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph”, and how “[t]he pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences” (Calvino 10). By foregrounding textual and linguistic elements such as a “chapter”, a “paragraph”, “[t]he pages of the book” and “sentences”, Traveller is undeniable engaging in metafictional play; that is, Traveller highlights to the reader its self-awareness that it is a text that comprises “chapter[s]”, “paragraph[s]”, and “sentences”.
The blurring of the diegetic levels, however, does not seem to detract from our immersion within the plot, but in fact increases it by metafictionally miming reality. In other words, when the narrator says that “a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph”, the paragraph is literally hidden from us. We do not read this hidden paragraph as it does not appear on the page. The atmosphere of “smok[iness]” and visual occlusion is thus enhanced, and in a rather literal fashion, through this metafictional device. The aspect of literality that Traveller engages with seems to promote an impression of realism – after all, if a realist text wants to reflect reality accurately, a literal reflection is perhaps the highest praise it can garner. In the same vein, when the narrator drily states that “[t]he novel here repeats fragments of conversation that seem to have no function beyond that of depicting the daily life of a provincial city”, it seems initially an irksome gesture that only demonstrates its self-congratulatory cleverness and self-referentiality (17). However, the dismissive and pedestrian nature of this sentence in fact performatively re-enacts the banality and the apparent lack of meaning in the “daily life of a provincial city”, echoing the suggestion that metafiction provides an additional diegetic and ontological plane for the textual reality to utilise.
Viewed in this light, TFLW and Traveller seem to suggest that we place too much focus on how metafictional texts “explore a theory of fiction”, and neglect the notion that metafiction is, essentially, still “the practice of writing fiction” (Waugh 2). Metafiction is contingent on the existence of fiction, and its ultimate desire is congruent to that of fiction’s: telling a story, albeit a story about a story. Metafiction is thus fundamentally inextricable from fiction. As a fictional text itself, metafiction has to “function by preserving a balance between the unfamiliar (the innovatory) and the familiar (the conventional or traditional)” (Waugh 12). Thus, if metafiction focusses too much on “the innovatory” by betraying the fragility of fiction to the extent where fiction cannot function, metafiction’s own existence is jeopardised. It has to preserve “the familiar”, and this preservation is one that not only keeps it in stasis, but allows it to develop new dimensions. After all, as the word “meta-fiction” itself suggests, metafiction relies on fiction as a “conventional or traditional” base before it can activate its “meta” facet and go “beyond, above, at a higher level” than fiction (OED).
Thus, when the metafictional text seems to deride and dismantle the act of reading, we must be aware that it is an ironic dismissal at best that actually reinforces that ontology of the text. Irnerio, in Traveller, declares that the secret “to not reading” is that “you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear” (Calvino 49). In this, Traveller seems to allude to the common complaint that metafiction works by “look[ing]” at the text in such an intensely theoretical fashion, analysing and disassembling it until the text, in the sense of a narrative, disappears entirely. Questioning the statement further, however, reveals that “look[ing] at [the written words] intensely, until they disappear” is perhaps the most apt description of what reading involves (49). After the words disappear, a world appears. Ryan echoes this sentiment when she posits that: “[w]hen readers are caught up in a story, they turn the pages without paying too much attention to the letter of the text”; the disappearance of “the letter of the text” allows us to “relate to these [fictional] characters … as possible human beings” (117). Metafiction’s intense staring of the text is, then, only a re-visioning of the act of reading that ultimately re-affirms the text, and not a desire to efface and shatter the text’s ontology.
It is pertinent at this point of the paper to consider why our relationship with the text returns to equilibrium so quickly after metafiction destabilises it. By the phrase “return to equilibrium”, I mean that after our initial jarring encounter with metafictional elements in a text, we seamlessly assimilate these metafictional elements into our apprehension of the textual reality, adding them to our store of conventions that we register only unconsciously. In fact, this seems to describe the process of reading, regardless of metafictional or a traditional realist text. Iser describes this reading process as the “process of absorbing the unfamiliar …… the establishment of affinities between oneself and someone outside oneself” (296). This suggests that it is not the text, but the way in which we apprehend reality, that is fragile; that is, our perception of reality, regardless of objective or textual, is fluid and easily malleable, fragile but not easily breakable. When we encounter an unfamiliar entity, we apprehend and understand it against a backdrop of our accumulated knowledge, and modify this bank of knowledge to accommodate it. In the same way that reading forces us constantly to re-think our ideas about the world by presenting defamiliarising them, metafiction impels us to re-cognise the way we read and relate to the world.
This absorption of any foreign object into our perceived objective reality is illustrated in Traveller when the translator in the incipit “Outside the town of Malbork” leaves a foreign word, “schoëblintsjia”, untranslated (Calvino 34). However, we quickly perceive what “schoëblintsjia” is, despite its unknowability and semantic impermeability to us:
But on reading schoëblintsjia you are ready to swear to the existence of schoëblintsjia, you can taste its flavor distinctly even though the text doesn’t say what that flavor is, an acidulous flavor, partly because the word, with its sound or only with its visual impression, suggests an acidulous flavor to you, and partly because in the symphony of flavors and words you feel the necessity of an acidulous note. (34-5)
In this, our ignorance of “schoëblintsjia” is dispelled as the narrator describes it: the “acidulous flavor” that the narrator associates with “schoëblintsjia” seems to be evoked in our mouths through the power of the narrator’s suggestion. The non-semantic aspects of language, such as “its sound or … its visual impression”, are also highlighted as meaning-making devices that contribute an additional layer of signification to the semantic value of a word. The textual reality that language constitutes, then, is not one that is solely imaginary, but also aural and visual. What this intimates, fundamentally, is that our epistemological conception of “schoëblintsjia” makes a metaphysical leap, allowing “schoëblintsjia” to attain a semblance of ontology solely through linguistic processes. Our ease at incorporating new concepts and objects into our conception of reality implies a certain malleability, or fragility, in our relationship with reality. Here, I am suggesting that this applies to our understanding of metafiction’s relationship with fiction in the sense that, after our initial surprise at metafictional elements, we can easily accommodate them in our conception of what a text is, and eventually cease to identify them as jarring and discordant elements that disrupt the textual reality.
In light of our apparent capacity to re-negotiate reality in whatever form it takes, it seems that it is necessary to alter this essay’s earlier claim that “any attempt to portray an objective reality is futile as language in Traveller only refers to itself in a regressive and infinite sequence”. The claim that any attempt to portray objective reality through language is futile may still stand, as an objective reality is one that, by definition, exists independently of our perceptions, while language is modulated by our perceptions. However, the discussion above about the imaginative creation of “schoëblintsjia” seems to assert that some sort of reality can be portrayed, or even created, nonetheless (34). Furthermore, this subjective reality is seemingly more representative and authentic than an objective one as it relates to us, the readers, in a direct way that is unmediated by external factors that get between our relationship with the textual reality. This is in contrast to how our construction of narratives to negotiate objective reality seems only to distance ourselves even further from reality, as we “fictionalise it” or reduce it to a textual narrative, as Fowles suggests (99). Thus, even if metafiction reveals that the text is a linguistic construct, it is a revelation that brings us closer to the text’s aim of portraying reality, regardless of textual or objective.
If we are able to, through the mere suggestion of words, apprehend “schoëblintsjia” as a fully realised object that possesses its own ontology, albeit one that is textual, then Borges’s description of “the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope” is one that seems to encapsulate the genesis of its being (14). Pushing this point further, it seems to suggest that the way in which we read and experience textual realities through language is analogous to the way in which the world of Tlön functions. That is, the metaphysics of Borges’s fictional world of Tlön, seem not to be speculative but an accurate and concise theory of how we read and relate to the reality within the text. Thus, the “idealism” of Tlön can be viewed as a representation of our approach to texts; in other words, the textual reality is contingent on our mental perception of it (8). The contingency of the textual reality on our minds, and not on an objective reality that the text purports to reflect and mime, seems to provide a reason as to why we smoothen discordant and jarring metafictional elements into the narrative plot so readily.
This also brings into question fiction’s claim of being a mirror to the world, if what we see in its mirror is only a reflection of the world in our minds. The implications of this statement is that there is perhaps not much of a distinction that we can make between the textual reality and objective reality: if we relate to the textual reality in an idealistic fashion (in the philosophical sense of the word), then perhaps our sense of all realities, regardless of textual or objective, are mediated the same way. The “first intrusion of this fantastic world [of texts] into the world of reality” is not an “intrusion”, then, but merely a cognisance of an underlying fact that structures the way we understand reality (16). That is to say that the textual reality has as much as ontological stability and strength as an objective reality due to how we perceive reality.
What Borges seems to be suggesting in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is that all of our experiences of reality, whether objective or textual, are mediated by our minds. Our minds, in turn, comprehend reality only by narrativising, which echoes Fowles’s statement that we “fictionalise [reality]” (99). However, Borges diverges from Fowles’s opinion as to why we narrativise our experiences. Fowles thinks that we “fictionalise” our lives because we want to “dress it up, … gild or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it”, in short, mentally editing it so that we feel pleased with the eventual “text” that is our lives, thus activating the “falsifying” connotation within the word “fictionalise” (99). On the other hand, Borges writes in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” that even though “Tlön”, the emblem of textual realities, is surely a labyrinth”, “[reality] longed to yield” to Tlön as “it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men” (17-8). In other words, Borges suggests that the reason why we turn to texts and why we narrativise our lives are the same: it is not in Fowles’s sense of “fictionalis[ing]” our lives, but to understand it by superimposing cause and effect relations atop it that will allow us to derive “a resemblance of order”, a semblance of meaning, from our lives (18). To borrow Barnes’s formulation of this idea in his novel Flaubert’s Parrot: “Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. .. Books make sense of life” (168).
Metafiction, then, attempts to make sense of life on a deeper level, by making sense of how we make sense of life. Understood this way, metafiction is a narrative of a narrative, which does not betray the fragility of the text, but reaffirms and reinvigorates it by granting it an additional ontological dimension to represent reality, and by interrogating further how we understand reality. Metafiction reveals that our understanding of objective reality is inextricable from the textual one, and through this revelation, allows the text to aspire to more authentic and ethical forms of representations of reality.
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